Baca participates in intense NASA internship

Tuesday

Mar 4, 2014 at 12:00 PMMar 4, 2014 at 3:19 PM

By Mike BodineSTAFF WRITERmbodine@ridgecrestca.com

Joshua Baca, a major in chemical engineering at Cerro Coso Community College, has finished “swimming with sharks.” This was how Baca explained his recently completed an intensive and highly competitive three-day internship with NASA.The National Community College Aerospace Scholars project is a hands-on program set at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The program is also a unique opportunity for would-be scientists and engineers to work and collaborate with real NASA scientists.The internship had 40 of the greatest community college minds in the country competing to start a company and organize a budget and public relations campaign, then construct a Mars rover that had to complete complicated tasks. The interns, who were broken into 10 teams, then had to present their company and product to top brass at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including Adam Seltzer, one of the designers of the Curiosity rover currently cruising around the Red Planet.Baca was one of more than 1,000 applicants nationwide, and one of only 316 who were asked to perform the online portion of the application. Out of those, 40 were selected and asked to proceed to the laboratory. The entire process began in December, and Baca finished up at JPL on Thursday, Feb. 27.“It was the most competitive experience I’ve ever had,” Baca said. He said the other interns had 3.9 and 4.0 GPAs, the best and brightest in his field. He said he averaged about three hours of sleep a night during the competition.He described the three-day whirlwind of events. He said the 40 interns were broken into 10 teams. He said the teams were picked in no particular order. Baca said the 40 were asked to sit down, and it was decided whomever the interns were sitting next to would be their team. The majority of the interns were mechanical engineers, with a few chemical and electrical engineers.He said it was a little awkward at first being teamed with complete strangers, but that was quickly washed away by the intensity and scale of the job they were asked to perform. “But you kind of know how everyone else felt,” Baca added. All the students are extremely competitive, but all with the same agenda. As a chemical engineer, Baca said he was responsible for fuel consumption and conservation. Baca explained chemical engineering is about conserving resources and space. He said he worked with the energy source of the rover: a lithium battery. His responsibilities extended to mathematical problems working out trajectories and vectors and mapping out a course for the rover.The team had to design a rover to perform a certain mission per JPL commands. The rover would have to navigate difficult terrain and perform tasks such as retrieving objects along the path. The objects were of different sizes.JPL had supplied the interns with pre-built rovers and basic sensors, but it was up to the students to program the software to get the rover to perform the tasks. The development of sensors and other basics of the module would have been far too technically complicated for the interns to develop in just three days. But there was plenty to do.But first, the teams had to invent fictitious rover companies. These businesses had to have budgets and then make presentations and sales pitches to NASA and JPL commanders. This all had to be done in three days.Baca said his team took fourth out of the 10 teams. He gained plenty of valuable experience from the event, the most important, Baca said, being the lesson of proper organization. Given such a short amount of time to complete so many tasks, there was little time for unnecessary steps or useless information.He said the collaboration with the other interns was a unique experience as well.Baca added he made some professional contacts at JPL and the internship has helped him get into the Pathways internship offered at the Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. He had already applied for Pathways, but the NASA internship scored him many points in that process.“It has already been a light in my path,” Baca said of the experience.Baca plans applying to UC Berkeley to pursue his chemical engineering career. According to NASA, “the National Community College Aerospace Scholars is a project based on the Texas Aerospace Scholars, originally created by the state of Texas in partnership with Johnson Space Center and the Texas education community. Both projects are designed to encourage community and junior college students to enter careers in science and engineering in order to join the nation’s high-technology workforce. “With this project, NASA continues the agency’s investment in educational programs that attract and retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, disciplines critical to NASA’s future missions.”

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